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Genoa
Synopsis Operation Genoa was a classified operation carried out by a team of Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) to extract two Marines who had been captured by Taliban militants in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush and were in danger of being sold to al-Qaeda for propaganda purposes. Story The tip for the story was originally given to Jerry Dantana by Cyrus West, a retired Air Force Captain who teaches public policy at the Maxwell School. Dantana, a producer from ACN's Washington D.C. bureau who was filling in for Jim Harper while the latter was covering the Mitt Romney campaign in New Hampshire, advocated for more critical coverage of the federal government's policies surrounding it's actions and involvement in the War on Terror, specifically subjects such as drone strikes, torture, and extraordinary rendition. West was brought on as part of a three-person panel to discuss various aspects of drone usage by the military, along with Sloan to discuss the economics of drones, and an ethicist to argue the ethics of drone strikes. West failed to adequately defend or explain the military's use of drones, remaining silent until the end of the segment. In an attempt to make up for his blunder, West offered Dantana a story that, according to West, "makes careers and ends Presidencies". According to West, the story goes that MARSOC units conducted an extraction to rescue two captured U.S. Marines, and during the course of the extraction, they deployed sarin gas and white phosphorous to neutralize enemy combatants. This also resulted in significant collateral damage as the Marines were being held in a small village in Waziristan, and most or all of the villagers were presumably killed from their exposure to the nerve agent while the Marines whom they were rescuing are believed to have survived their exposure to sarin because the extraction team would've given them a dose of atropine. Initially Mack was incredulous, but she allowed Dantana to assemble a team to aid him in researching Genoa when they weren't assigned with higher priorities. In the following months the team would stay after work every night to make phone calls in an attempt to trace any of the participants of Genoa who would be willing to tell the story. As time passed, the team was able to track down various sources including Gunnery Sergeant Eric Sweeney, who claimed to have been a part of the operation, a Twitter user named "Hamni8" who described Genoa as it unfolded in a series of tweets, Brigadier General Stanislaus Stomtonovich who was known for his advocacy of preserving America's stockpile of chemical weapons, a flight manifest purported to be from the helicopters that were involved in the raid and which featured an enigmatic name listed in the weapons package believed to have been a reference to classified material vis-a-vis sarin gas canisters. Additionally, they serendipitously connected with Lance Corporal Herman Valenzuela who was also involved in the operation, as well as an Occupy Wall Street activist who worked for an NGO that was shut down by the Pakistani government after he wrote a report that claimed the U.S. had used chemical weapons against civilians. All of these sources corroborated the original story Cyrus West had given Dantana, and after nearly a year of accumulating facts, reviewing the evidence, and holding a series of red team meetings to verify that the story holds up to scrutiny, Charlie, Will, and Mack elected to take the story to air. Despite the strong reservations of Jim, Don, Sloan and a few others. The story ran on a Sunday night in News Night's usual time slot (8PM) and garnered 5.8 million viewers, the largest audience ever for a cable television news program. An entire show was dedicated to the special report on Operation Genoa featuring content produced by Dantana, interviews with Sweeney, Stomtonovich, and Valenzuela; background on the U.S. supply of chemical weapons and it's failure to dispose of it's stockpile by 2008 as agreed upon by the Chemical Weapons Convention. The show closed with a note that The Pentagon declined to comment. The following morning the newsroom was hit hard by a definitive response in a press release from the Pentagon calling the story false and stating they were considering any and all legal means available to them including under the Espionage Act, and would be declassifying documents in the meantime to disprove the claims made by ACN. The story began to unravel when Stomtonovich furiously contacted Charlie and claimed he never said what ACN reported he had said, and said his testimony in the story was altered. Then when Elliot Hirsch followed up on News Night's reporting on his own show, he conducted a live interview with Eric Sweeney in which Sweeney began to stray off topic and describe his units tasks in Iraq, at which point Sweeney unwittingly divulged that he along with two others in his unit sustained Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) when their Humvee was hit by an IED. Panicking, Elliot tossed to break but the damage had already been done as the revelation of Sweeney's TBI discredits his testimony due to the effects a TBI would have on memory recall. Later, Charlie reached out to his friend Shep, an agent with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) who supplied Charlie with the flight manifest. Shep proceeded to explain that his son had been a recovering addict and went to work for ACN, but had been fired for behavioral reasons which lead to a relapse and his subsequent death. Losing his son and then his wife to divorce, Shep held Charlie responsible and told him that he considered having him killed, but instead chose to ruin his career since that would be more devastating for Charlie. When Dantana began contacting MARSOC operators about Genoa, Shep caught wind of this and orchestrated the rest of the situation to make the ACN team believe West's version of the Genoa operation was true. His parting words to Charlie were to hold the flight manifest under light for 30 seconds; in so doing the light revealed a message written in invisible ink that read, "Fuck you Charlie." The final nail in the coffin came when Mack was prompted to review the footage of Dantana's interview with General Stomtonovich after she glanced at a countdown clock that Jake had previously shown her as an aid for Will in the studio. She brought up the raw footage to review and realized that the shot clock for the college basketball game was visible in the background, and as such it revealed that Dantana had tampered with the raw footage when the shot clock skipped around multiple times, proving that the footage had been cut. In so doing, Dantana had committed journalistic malpractice by deliberately misrepresenting the commentary from General Stomtonovich in their interview. Mack immediately fired Dantana, then told Will and the News Night team that they would have to use that nights show to retract the Genoa story rather than report on the unfolding events of the Attacks in Benghazi. In his deposition with the legal team, Will explains that Genoa was indeed a real rescue operation but that the U.S. never used any chemical weapons. The Marines involved wore MOPP gear, as Sweeney had recounted, but only for their own protection in case the militants had biological weapons. The MARSOC's use of white phosphorous was only to mark the targets, which is a legal use of the compound. The Twitter user "Hamni8" hadn't ceased Tweeting because he was killed in the raid, rather his prepaid cell phone plan ran out and he could no longer send Tweets. Valenzuela never offered anything new in his interview with Mack due to his conviction that he needed to back up what Sweeney, a brother-in-arms, had told them. In the end, the legal analysis determined the story ran because of an institutional failure to recognize the falsity of the story. Charlie, Mack and Will all tendered their resignations to Leona Lansing as a sacrifice in hopes of salvaging whatever credibility and respect the show and the network had left. However, Leona refused to accept their resignations and instead challenged them to earn the trust of the public back. Behind the scenes The story arc of Operation Genoa bears striking resemblance to the real life account of Operation Tailwind. A joint report by CNN and Time Magazine recounting a Vietnam War operation. Just like Genoa, CNN and Time reported that Tailwind utilized sarin gas in it's operation, however that detail was untrue while Tailwind did indeed happen.